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The UN General Assembly on Friday (Korea Time) adopted a European Union-sponsored resolution on North Korean human rights with 84 votes in favor, 22 votes against and 62 abstentions. The South Korean government abstained from the vote as it did when similar resolutions were approved at the UN Commission on Human Rights in 2004 and 2005.
North Korea, which joined the World Human Rights Convention a decade before South Korea in 1981, found in the world body a useful venue for criticizing the South's authoritarianism and human rights conditions and falsely propagandizing its own human rights record.
The world body's latest resolution, confirmed by the 191-member General Assembly, now serves to confirm the fact that North Korea's abuse of human rights is more appalling than any other nation. It trumpeted this acknowledgment by inviting everyone to participate in improving the way that one of the most tightly-controlled and isolated societies of the modern world treats its citizens.
Pyongyang should come to the conclusion, belatedly rather than not at all, that its human rights abuses threaten to provoke the international community more than the ongoing nuclear dispute, possibly leading to more severe and more sustained pressure being leveled at the regime of Dear Leader Kim Kong Il.
Though it has abstained from voting on resolutions relating to North Korean human rights, the South Korean government has continuously supported a similar motion directed at Burma and spearheaded by the UN General Assembly since 2003, when the South was a co-sponsor of the resolution.
When it comes to respecting its people, however, Burma remains a class above North Korea.
The UN resolution on Burma focuses on tackling the regime's suppression of opposition leaders like Aung San Suu Kyi and slaughters resulting from racial conflict. Burma also has resistance forces that do not exist in North Korea. And where are its Soviet-style concentration camps?
Can we attribute the Korean government's decision to tiptoe around human rights resolutions on North Korea while co-sponsoring a parallel motion on Burma merely to a misguided sense of justice? Does the administration really believe that political freedom in Burma trumps the human rights crisis being felt by our 23 million brethren in the North?
History proves that it is more effective to approach the human rights issue from a multilateral, or global, framework than to attempt handling it through tenuous bilateral relations.
It beggars belief that a government unable to vote properly at the UN thinks it can approach the human rights issue in inter-Korean relations with any modicum of success. We can only hope the international community does not view the South Korean government as a stumbling bloc to reforming the systemic abuses that occur on a daily basis in the North. If it does, it can hardly be expected to take a leading role in the effort.
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